You got too much time on your hands. Head down South and help with some volunteering young buck.

Speaking of Skype, I set it up for my mother-in-law. I was one day using her account/PC and I was just bombarded by people, mostly Chinese that wan't to chat (I was using the profile of 60-something, married, Japanese, female). Yet, I got the vibe that all these people were looking for was (a) Japanese girlfriends, or (b) wanted free Japanese lessons.

I got into a heated fight with one Chinese guy when I insisted that I didn't want to chat with him, and that my Skype account was setup for ONLY making calls between my Japanese and US families. He went off on how all Japanese are so closed minded.

Gizmo Project (http://www.gizmoproject.com/) is way, way better. It's more stable, and the call quality blows skype out of the water. The interface is great on Mac OS X, and they proudly display Mac OS support. You should really try it - I've been using both skype and gizmo project (bought $10 lineout credit with both in August) as my home phone for the past 3 weeks, and I can safely say that Gizmo rocks.

That was a funny read. I may be a little behind, but what exactly is a "419 scammer"? Is that just someone who does scams online or is it this specific kind of scam (the "I'm trapped in a foreign nation and need money" scam)?

Edit: noticed this on the wiki, "If you receive an offer via email from someone claiming to need your help getting money out of Nigeria â€” or any other country, for that matter â€” forward it to the FTC at spam@uce.gov." Did you do it?

Supposedly at any point in any one day there are 20 Americans sitting in arrival lounges or hotel bars in Nigeria expecting to be met there by whoever they were supposedly helping launder $MILLIONS for.

The reason these scams go on and on and on is because there are enough stupid people out there to make it profitable. It only needs one idiot and they'll make a profit if he's stupid enough and rich enough.